How our Napoleon Vegemite Raygun broke breaking

Everybody’s laughing at Australia’s Olympic breakdancing queen Rachael Gunn, especially everybody here in the US where the alleged sport was invented, writes Tim Blair.

Everybody is laughing at Australia’s Olympic breakdancing queen Rachael Gunn, especially everybody here in the US where the alleged sport was invented.

Of course, it was invented way back in the 1980s, and any surviving early-days dancers would likely break their pelvises if they tried now to duplicate Raygun’s bolder moves.

Such as the Injured Spider, the Blunder Plunge with Giggle Hands or her awesome, globally celebrated Skippy Hop.

So score some fracture-avoidance points there for our white 36-year-old university lecturer, who didn’t actually score any official Olympic points at all for her attempts to emulate a black teenager’s street performances from a time prior to her birth.

According to Macquarie University lecturer Raygun – or Napoleon Vegemite, as she’s more wittily been dubbed – is “an interdisciplinary and practice-based researcher interested in the cultural politics of breaking”.

Raygun in action at the Olympics, left, and American actor Jon Heder, of Napoleon Dynamite fame recreates the Napoleon Dynamite dance.

Seems about right, considering she’s probably busted any chance of breakdancing ever being taken seriously at any level outside of Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo 80s nostalgia festivals.

Any of Raygun’s fellow “interdisciplinary and practice-based researchers” who are “interested in the cultural politics of breaking” must be absolutely besides themselves.

Which would make a total of, I don’t know, possibly two.

Raygun does have her defenders, who applaud the academic for doing her own thing and not being afraid to be different.

Which is their way of saying that breakdancing isn’t a real sport, because they’d never offer those excuses for anyone who ran the 100m sprint backwards or turned up at the dressage finals with a walrus.

Raygun leaving the Olympic village....

and breakdancing before the closing ceremony.

And the biggest Raygun defender is Raygun herself. “All my moves are original,” she told CNN in Paris, accurately if unintentionally identifying her central problem.

“Creativity is really important to me,” the lecturer added, creatively.

“I go out there and I show my artistry. Sometimes it speaks to the judges and sometimes it doesn’t. I do my thing and it represents art. That is what it is about.”

Raygun competes during the B-Girls Round Robin in Paris. Picture: Getty

Well, OK. But before placing this entire debacle in the ever-bulging file of historic Olympic oddities, let’s consider applying Raygun’s artistic way of doing things in a different format.

We’ve just seen what happens when a Sydney humanities lecturer attempts to become a breakdancing champion.

It is only fair, then, that surly head-spinning rappers and the like be allowed to replace Sydney humanities lecturers.

Breakdancing may be dead as an Olympic sport, but dead concepts simply never die in Australian arts faculties. Let the dance continue.

But keep Raygun out of it. We’ve only got so many surviving sets of functioning eyeballs.